Art reviews: Admiral Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander | Derek Clarke: Two Weeks in St Abbs, 1951

Admiral Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh ****

Derek Clarke: Two Weeks in St Abbs, 1951

Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh ****

HOW many actual historical individuals have inspired, not just the occasional novel, but a whole genre of page-turners? Andrew Selkirk, perhaps, as model for Robinson Crusoe and every desert island down to Desert Island Discs; the Edinburgh doctor Joseph Bell was the model for Sherlock Holmes and so for all detective novels that followed. Bell himself was not a detective, though, and while Defoe’s invention offered a setting to countless fictions, the actual exploits of Crusoe/Selkirk were not echoed in them. Beside these fictional heroes, therefore, the novels inspired by the life of the Scottish sailor, Thomas Cochrane, seem almost biography.

Cochrane’s career had already been turned into fiction in his lifetime. Pioneering the genre, Captain Frederick Marryat’s sailor novels such as Mr Midshipman Easy were inspired by serving in the navy with Cochrane himself.

Later Cochrane was inspiration for CS Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and for Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey. His daring is still current, too. In the film, Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, based on O’Brian’s novel, some of the exploits of Jack Aubrey reflect actual episodes from Cochrane’s adventurous naval life. Even Aubrey’s truculent character, played by Russell Crowe, reflects something of the personality of Cochrane, who was at once brilliant and notoriously difficult.

Cochrane was a great Scottish hero, but although his statue stands in cities in South America where he is hailed as a liberator, he is little remembered in his native land. Now, however, his story is told at the National Museum of Scotland in an exhibition The Real Master and Commander. Cochrane was son of the Earl of Dundonald, a title he later inherited, and went to sea in 1793 aged 17. He claimed his only patrimony was a gold watch, but he did have a well-placed naval uncle and with that advantage was given command of a small warship, HMS Speedy, in 1801. Straight away he captured a much larger Spanish ship, the El Gamo. Bluffing the bigger ship with a neutral flag, he sailed so close that his own tiny ship was beneath the line of fire of the Spanish guns. This daring victory gave Cochrane instant celebrity and is vividly recorded here in a painting by Nicholas Pocock.

Pocock was a contemporary and a professional sea painter. It would have been helpful to be told this on the label, as it suggests the image is based on eyewitness reports.

In 1806, in command of the frigate HMS Pallas, Cochrane pulled off an even more spectacular victory defeating three Spanish ships singlehanded. This event is also recorded in a fine painting by Eduardo de Martino. It was painted in 1896, much later therefore, but again there is a point missed in the label. Eduardo de Martino worked in South America. It is testament to Cochrane’s enduring reputation there that a picture of one of his celebrated victories should still seem topical 90 years later.

In 1809, Cochrane led fire ships in a daring raid on the French fleet in the Basque Roads, an anchorage sheltered from the Bay of Biscay by the Isle d’Oleron. His success earned him a knighthood, but he maintained that if his commander, Admiral Lord Gambier, had backed him up they would have destroyed the French entirely, a view surprisingly confirmed by Napoleon himself in exile on St Helena in conversation with another British sailor.

Cochrane was not just a brilliant sailor. His habit of bold thinking at sea took him into politics on land. He was elected in 1807 as a radical MP with a reforming agenda, particularly to end corruption in the navy. A Gillray cartoon shows him at the top of a greasy pole dressed in his naval uniform, but with the striped trousers of the French Revolution.

In 1814 he came to grief, implicated rightly or wrongly in a Stock Exchange fraud whose ingenuity might indeed suggest his involvement. (Jack Aubrey suffers a similar fate in The Reverse of the Medal.) A rumour spread that Napoleon was dead; shares shot up; money was made. Cochrane was convicted of involvement in the fraud, imprisoned, dismissed from Parliament and from the navy and stripped of his knighthood. The disgrace of such a critic was suspiciously convenient for the government. Cochrane was re-elected to Parliament from prison and remained in the Commons till 1817.

He then joined the Chilean fight for independence from Spain, brought to the war his customary brilliance and drove the Spanish out of the Pacific, effectively liberating Peru as well as Chile. His successful attack on the Spanish ship the Esmeralda in harbour in Peru is recorded here in a splendid night scene. It is identified simply as by Edmund Crawford without further comment, but the artist, usually known as ET Crawford, was an RSA and a leading contemporary Scottish painter. His picture is an indication that Crawford’s South American exploits were not lost on his compatriots at home. Quarrelsome as always, Cochrane then moved on from Chile to help liberate Brazil.

Like Byron, whom he resembles, Cochrane then joined the Greek War of Independence, though with less impact. Throughout these campaigns, he was awarded a series of splendid orders, decorations and more practical rewards, many on view here.

At home he was eventually pardoned and reinstated in the navy by William IV, himself a sailor. Queen Victoria also restored his knighthood and he was later elevated to rear admiral, but his glory days were past and, in the British Navy at least, he never enjoyed the major command in war that he so clearly deserved. His brilliance as a sailor was not just the result of impulsive daring, however, but of inventiveness and command of detail. This is reflected in his parallel career as engineer and inventor, shown here in meticulous drawings. Nor was he an amateur. A list of his patents includes a sophisticated rotary steam engine. More dubiously, he sought to pioneer gas warfare, but was overruled. Typically, too, Cochrane was the first to deploy a steamship in war.

In his originality and many-sidedness he was a truly a man of the Enlightenment. His statue stands in Valparaiso, but there seems to be no fitting painting of him from his active years. A picture here from 1807 by Eduard Ströhling, apparently from the Government Art Collection, shows him as man of action, but is too small to do him justice. The only full-length, by Sir George Hayter, is certainly grand, but dates from the end of his life. The SNPG only has a bust by Patrick Park, a sadly inert image of this great man of action.

The only link I can think of to Derek Clarke is chronological. Born in 1912 and so approaching his century, he is the doyen of Scottish art. Cochrane died in 1860. So short are the generations that in his childhood Clarke could easily have known people who had known him.

However tenuous the link, Clarke’s small exhibition at Bourne Fine Art shouldn’t pass without notice. He came to Scotland to teach at ECA in 1947. His exhibition consists of just five pictures, all painted in a creative fury at St Abbs in 1951, the first break he had from teaching. The 1950s were a drab time. Much of the art was confused and full of angst, but these are lucid, colourful and beautifully structured pictures.

There is no self-indulgence, none of the nostalgic but illusory cosiness so common in paintings of picturesque fishing ports. These are working harbours and working men.

It is a clear and positive vision, and an uncommon one at the time, of the bright and better world for which the long, grim war had been fought. At least one of these splendid pictures should be in the national collection.

• Admiral Cochrane runs until 19 February 2012, Derek Clarke until 22 October